Saturday, September 29, 2012

Mon-El - Legion of Super-Heroes/Five Years Later

Over the next several days I will be presenting a series of Legionnaires once again commissioned by Michael. The first up is Mon-El. A lot of things have been done to Mon-El through the various reboots, but for me he will always be Superboy's "big brother". It would seem that Mon-El was always an explorer. I remember the first time I read Adventure Comics # 354 featuring Superman visiting the Adult Legion. Superman is being brought up to date on the live's of his friends and finds out that Mon has left the Legion to explore space and to help colonies that are pushing further into deep space. Learning about this, Superman says it was always Mon's dream to explore. Pretty cool story. So that is my inspiration for this piece. Mon-El, Five Years Later is the explorer he wanted to be.

Side note to that story, Mon-El and Shadow Lass were a couple through much of the Legion run. But there wasn't a Shadow Lass in the regular, or younger Legion when this story was published. The cover of Adventure Comics #354 shows Superman walking through a hall of statues of Legionnaires who died in action. One of them is Shadow Woman "who died saving the Science Asteroid". (Though Shadow Woman is shown with caucasian skin color instead of the blue skin Shadow Lass had) One might guess that when Shadow Woman died, Mon left the Legion. None of that was planned back then but putting all this together is the kind of thing that makes the Legion lore so fun. There was a Legion story later published in the 80s I think, that had the event take place where Shadow Woman would die. Caucasian skin color and all. But she lived and thus altering the timeline we saw in Adventure Comics #354.